Miner's Daughter

In 1896, when Evalyn Walsh was ten, her tough, Tipperary-born father struck gold at Ouray, Colo. Tom Walsh had lived in a boxcar, tended store in Deadwood, and hammered outcroppings for fruitless decades. But when the millions rolled in he twirled the ends of his handlebar mustache, hustled his family off to Washington and swore that his daughter was going to be a lady. Evalyn promptly swore that she wouldn't. She didn't. But in the next 50 years she proved that with $100 million, a wild Irish miner's daughter could do almost everything else under the sun.

She started her career almost immediately. When the Walshes went off to Europe to meet King Albert of the Belgians, she licked Baedekers to make her lips red and practiced walking like Parisian coquettes. (She was 14.) She was unawed by the $865,000 palace her father built at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. She swiped creme de menthe from his liquor closet, squandered her allowance on ermine tails, and ruined the nerves of a series of hapless governesses.

By the time she was 18 she had met and startled half the world's celebrities. She took to narcotics after an automobile accident in which her brother was killed and in which she was so badly hurt that her right leg was shortened by an inch and a half. Then she cured herself of the drug habit, married Edward Beale McLean, a handsome, charming, rich man's son, whose family owned the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Sixty Telegrams. It was a riotous marriage. The newlyweds sailed for Europe with the ceiling of their honeymoon stateroom blanketed with orchids. After one tempestuous quarrel Evalyn chartered a yacht, left her husband. He sent her 60 consecutive telegrams begging forgiveness, and she came back. One day at Carder's, McLean spent $154,000 on a present which was to be inseparably linked with her name for the rest of her life--the baleful, blue Hope Diamond, which had supposedly brought death or disaster to all who had owned it.*

She made fascinating material for the Sunday-supplement writers. Evalyn Walsh McLean was dogged by disaster. She hired detectives to guard her first child, Vinson; she provided a scrubbed, perfumed Negro boy to "keep him from getting spoiled by wealth." But he was killed by an automobile when he was nine. Her marriage ended tragically. Hard-drinking Ned McLean's mind gave way--in a moment of wild humor he sent her a Latvian divorce summons done up in a Christmas box decorated with tiny reindeer and holly. He was committed to an insane asylum a little later, finally died there in 1941.

Evalyn refused to be subdued. She had chosen a reckless way of life, and she pursued it with persistent hardihood. She was constantly moved to outbursts of wild generosity. When the straggling Bonus Army of World War I veterans marched on Washington in 1932, she fed them, bought them cigarets, provided a circus tent to house them.

Poor, Dismal Russians. She flaunted her wealth, but she was never underhanded or petty, seldom lost her rowdy sense of humor. When she dyed her hair, which was often, she called her friends to announce the event. She never tried to hide her age, nor the wilder episodes of her life, published the facts about both in a garrulous, ghosted autobiography, Father Struck It Rich. Once she made a trip to Communist Russia and wore her jewels at Moscow nightclubs. "They hated me," she said later, "but it was the first thrill those poor, dismal Russians had had in ten years."

Her fabulous Washington house, Friendship, matched her personality. It was furnished in a style reminiscent both of Versailles and a fancy bordello. She slept between pink silk sheets which cost $4,000 apiece, and kept a magnifying glass as big as a dinner plate, with which she inspected her collection of paperweights and ore samples. Friendship was the scene of her triumphs. Homely, over-rouged, and clanking with diamonds, Evalyn McLean hypnotized and dominated generations of officeholders and nouveaux riches, the generals, admirals, Senators, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and ambassadors who make up the capital's complex and varied social whirl.

Mixed Guests. Her parties were frequent and mammoth--she rarely invited fewer than 100 people, often entertained two or three hundred, and spent as much as $50,000 on a big affair. They were wonderful shows. They were charged with undercurrents of excitement, generated in part by her prodigal distribution of champagne and in part by her habit of mixing up her guests to see what would happen. She seated Republicans with Democrats, put gossip columnists near their prey and often asked John L. Lewis in to glower or quote Shakespeare, as the spirit moved him. She entertained as lavishly as ever during World War II; she thought the capital's morale would suffer if she stopped her parties. Few generals refused her caviar.

Seven months ago, the McLean parties finally stopped for good. Her 2 5-year-old daughter Evalyn, fifth wife of North Carolina's aging ex-Senator Robert R. Reynolds, died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Then, last week, after 60 years of fabulous living, Evalyn Walsh McLean came down with pneumonia.

An oxygen tent was set up in her room at Friendship, but she died 24 hours later. Even in death she was surrounded by celebrities. The Rev. Edmund A. Walsh, vice president of Georgetown University, administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Ex-Trust Buster Thurman (The Folklore of Capitalism) Arnold, Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy and Mrs. Eleanor ("Cissie") Patterson, owner of the Washington Times-Herald, were at her bedside.

* Some of the diamond's former owners: Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette, both beheaded; Lord Francis Hope, whose wife ran off with a U.S. Army officer; Habib Bey, drowned; Prince Ivan Kanitovsky, murdered by revolutionists; Lorens Ladue, murdered; and Sultan Abdul. Hamid, who was deposed by the Young Turks.

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